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The article reviews the book, "Last Night Shift in Savar: The Story of the Spectrum Sweater Factory Collapse," by Doug Miller.

This article reviews the book, "Indigenous Encounters with Neoliberalism: Place, Women, and the Environment in Canada and Mexico," by Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez.

The article reviews the book, "Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era," by Alex Goodall.

This article reviews the book, "Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera," by Rosemary Hennessey.

It appears to me that there is an obligation on any court studying the constitutionality of a provision of law, first, to give a detailed examination of the specific provision of law it is studying, as well as the whole context of the right, before pronouncing on its consti- tutionality. It is the failure of the Supreme Court of Canada majority in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour1 to do so that has given rise to much commentary, with one prominent newspaper questioning the "shoddy reasoning," the "curiously selective research" and the "slapdash approach to precedent."'2 Indeed, it is this failure that gives rise to the question of what the decision actually decides.' The majority judgment can best be understood in light of its misplaced emulation of European law, which is quite different from ours, and its frequent references to the Committee on Freedom of Association of the ILO. Although the Committee is not a judicial body, the majority judgment elevates it to one, though making the interesting proviso that the Committee's decisions are "not strictly binding."'4 The problems with showing such deference to the Committee on Freedom of Association are well known, and I will touch on them only briefly. One has only to read the papers by Brian Langille as well as Sonia Regenbogen, both of whom have gone to great lengths to study the committees of the ILO, to be disabused of the notion that these "committees" are judicial bodies or that their decisions are in any way binding on our courts.5 Indeed, in the Fraser case, I was amazed when, approximately two months after the matter was en delibdri, the Supreme Court received a missive from one of the ILO committees telling the Court its views on how the decision should be rendered.6 I strenuously objected to this document on two grounds: (1) how did the ILO committee know, in a secret delibdri, that one side needed its help? and, (2) by what right was a non-party to the Supreme Court proceedings lobbying the Court after the hear- ing, an action which the Court would properly have forbidden a party from taking? What may be less well known and understood are the basic dif- ferences between European labour law and our own.' The European law is based on a system of "voluntarism," whereby employees are free to join or not to join a union. An article quoted by the Court in B.C. Health makes this clear (though the Court's reliance on the article is unfortunate, given that the article's authors are referring to Convention 98 of the ILO, which Canada has not even ratified):' In view of the fact that the voluntary nature of collective bargaining is a funda- mental aspect of the principles of freedom of association, collective bargaining

The article reviews the book, "America's Assembly Line," by David E. Nye.

Working at the mill had been a family affair for generations of Sturgeon Falls’ mill workers, as young men followed their fathers, uncles, older brothers, and occasionally mothers, into the Northern Ontario mill – the town’s largest employer for more than a century. The mill’s workforce was overwhelmingly white and male, with a historic linguistic divide between largely English-speaking managers and mainly French-speaking production workers. This linguistic division of labour and the near total exclusion of Aboriginal people were remnants of industrial colonialism in the region. Within a year of the mill’s December 2002 closure, I began interviewing the former employees about their experiences and these interviews continued for the next two years. During that time, efforts to reopen the mill fizzled out and it was demolished by the departing company. Work-life oral histories offer us a way into the shifting sands of culture and economy in this former mill town. This article explores the shifting sense of temporal and spatial proximity or distance in the plant shutdown stories told by 37 former mill workers. Several dimensions of proximity are explored such as the temporal proximity of the interview to the events being recounted, the perceived social proximity that prevailed before the mill closing, the remembered physical proximity of the mill in the narrated lives of residents, and, now, after the mill’s closure, the spectre of forced relocation or distant daily commutes to new jobs in other towns and cities. For long-service workers, employment mobility or permanent relocation was understood to be a last resort. These interviews make clear that forced employment mobility was a core concern to everyone we interviewed, not just those who actually relocated or commuted to jobs found elsewhere.

The article reviews the book, "Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940," by Michael Innis-Jiménez.

The article reviews the book, "Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront," by Penny A. Peterson.

The article reviews the book, "Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon," by Eileen R. Janzen.

This article reviews the book, "The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, History," by Tara Martin Lopez.

This article reviews the book, "The Left in British Columbia: A History of Struggle," by Gordon Hak.

This article reviews the books, "Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume I: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents," edited by Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell, and "Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume II: Canada – National and Transnational Contexts," edited by Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh.

Prominent writers in industrial relations (IR) have concluded the field is in significant decline, partly because of a failed theory base. The theory problem is deepened because other writers conclude developing a theory foundation for industrial relations is neither possible nor desirable. We believe advancing IR theory is both needed and possible, and take up the challenge in this paper. A long-standing problem in theorizing industrial relations has been the lack of agreement on the field’s core analytical construct. However, in the last two decades writers have increasingly agreed the field is centred on the employment relationship. Another long-standing problem is that writers have theorized industrial relations using different theoretical frames of reference, including pluralist and radical-Marxist; different disciplinary perspectives, such as economics, sociology, history, and politics; and from different national traditions, such as British, French, and American. In this paper, we seek to advance IR theory and better integrate paradigms and national traditions. We do this by developing an analytical explanation for four core features of the employment relationship—generation of an economic surplus, cooperation-conflict dialectic, indeterminate nature of the employment contract, and asymmetric authority and power in the firm—using an integrative mix of ideas and concepts from the pluralist and radical-Marxist streams presented in a multi-part diagram constructed with marginalist tools from conventional economics. The diagram includes central IR system components, such as labour market, hierarchical firm, macro-economy, and nation state government. The model is used to explain the four features of the employment relationship and derive implications for IR theory and practice. Examples include the diagrammatic representation of the size and distribution of the economic surplus, a new analytical representation of labour exploitation, identification of labour supply conditions that encourage, respectively, cooperation versus conflict, and demonstration of how inequality of bargaining power in labour markets contributes to macroeconomic stagnation and unemployment.

Announces that the journal is now a joint partnership of the Canadian Committee on Labour History with Athabaska University Press, in affiliation with the Canadian Association of Labour Studies.

This article reviews the book, "The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale and the Second World War in Winnipeg," by Jody Perrun.

The article reviews the book, "Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968," edited by Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith.

In this study, we examine the role of mutual trustworthiness between labour representatives and management and its relationship with the adoption of High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) in the Korean employment relations context. We argue that trustworthiness is a feature of the parties to the exchange, as opposed to trust, which explains the nature of exchange relationships. We follow existing literature on trustworthiness and agree that it is composed of three variables, i.e., ability, integrity, and benevolence. We test the effects of these three variables as important antecedents for the adoption of HPWS at the workplace level. Using the National Establishment Survey 2009 conducted by Statistics Korea as a sample frame, we survey a representative sample of Korean establishments. These data consist of 1,353 paired responses from labour representatives and managers. Our results show that labour-management mutual ability trustworthiness (MAT) has a positive and significant relationship with the adoption of high performance work systems (Hypothesis 1); mutual benevolence trustworthiness (MBT) has a positive and significant relationship with the adoption of high performance work systems (Hypothesis 2); and mutual integrity trustworthiness (MIT) has a positive and significant relationship with the adoption of high performance work systems (Hypothesis 3). These results show that mutual trustworthiness in Korean employment relations is an important antecedent for the adoption of HPWS and can enable Korean industry to improve its position in the global economy. In the final analysis, it is implied that employment relations actors pursuing cooperative employment practices should ensure the development of a virtuous cycle of mutual trustworthiness. (English)

Our goal is to analyze strategies of union revitalization that have been successful elsewhere and have the potential to become so in Spain. Within these practices, Social Movement Unionism focuses on alliances with other groups to improve unions’ social efficiency. In this article, we address the applicability of the principles of Social Movement Unionism in the specific case of Spain. Given the transformations in the Spanish economy and labour laws tending towards further deregulation, Spanish unions have had to react. The emergence of new social movements such as the Indignados or Mareas Ciudadanas (civic tides) and the declining confidence in unions among the Spanish population, make this approach timely and appropriate. For this article, we will take certain aspects from the trade union revitalization debate and combine them with the main theories on New Social Movements. We will apply these approaches to a specific case study: The viability of cooperation between the largest Spanish trade unions and the recent social movements arising from the Indignados movement. For this purpose, we will primarily use data from secondary sources and transcripts of interviews conducted with unionists and social movement activists. With all these elements taken into consideration, we will conclude by showing the inhibiting and facilitating conditions for the development of a Social Movement Unionism strategy for the referred actors.